An important part of the GoEmail software is the comprehensive reports that it provides you for each campaign. But are you actually analysing the data in detail or just checking how many people have opened your email? While checking the open rate is an important part of the reports it is not the only measure of success. There are many lessons that can be learned by constantly reviewing your reports, some of these are:
- Achieve better results – If you constantly monitor your reports then you can start to get an idea of what your customers want. Are you keeping your customers engaged? Building your customer database or are you seeing some emails generating more unsubscribes then others? Why not use the ideas and concepts of your last successful email and incorporate them into future campaigns.
- Drive efficiency – You can reduce the time you spend in designing your email campaigns by understanding what type and style of emails work for your business. Then you can create a template that can be used for future campaigns so you can get the best ROI for your efforts.
- Keep up to date with current marketing trends – That newsletter you send every month no longer getting the same open rates as before? Maybe it’s time to research on the changing trends for email marketing to see what current tactics are being used. You don’t want your business to be left behind the times.
Here are just some of the reporting metrics that can help you improve your email campaigns
- Open Rates – For most people this is the first statistic that they check in the reports. It gives you a good idea of how many people have viewed your email. But did you know that the open rates are just an indicative figure and not a true indication of how many have viewed the email. The way the system identifies an email as opened is when images in the email are viewed or downloaded or when a link within the email is clicked. So design the email to make it engaging, have links that can be clicked.
Why not target those who opened the email with a second email a week later? You can also see how many times a person has opened the email. Maybe follow up with a phone call to those who have opened the email multiple times you might be able to generate a new lead.
- Bounced Rates – Review your bounced emails on a regular basis. You might want to update your records with a customer’s new contact details or maybe it’s time to remove the bounced email from your contacts list and reduce the amount of records you have stored.
Over time if you don’t tidy your database and continually have high bounce rates this might have a negative impact on your reputation. Mail programs like Gmail might start recognising you as a spam sender which will reduce the chances for successful delivery. A bounce rate of less than 3% is healthy; anything higher means you have quality issues with your database that needs fixing.
- Unsubscribes – GoEmail automatically stores a record of those who have unsubscribed from previous campaigns. But if you no longer need that record then you should remove them from your database. Deleting the records that have unsubscribed will reduce your database size and might result in reduced costs.
It is also important to understand why customers are unsubscribing from your content. Maybe you need to be more specific in who receives what content and be more targeted in your campaigns. This will increase customer engagement and will also go a long way to reducing the amount of unsubscribe records you get back.
- Click Map – This is a useful report to get a visual understanding of what links are being clicked and how often. Do you have multiple links in your email design? Do the links you have at the top of the page generate more clicks than those lower down? Look at trends and find out what links are generating the most clicks. This goes a long way to creating a layout that is more engaging with your customers.
The longer you can keep a customer engaged, the better the chances they will read your entire email and this will also build on your reputation which will help get your subscribers to continue to read future emails.
- Mail Clients Report – You can use this report to understand what are the most popular mail clients used by your customers. Use the report to make sure you optimise your email design for that particular mail client and also test your email on the popular mail clients to see if your design and layout is how you want it to look. Remember all mail clients may render the email you designed differently so always test to make sure it looks the way you intend it to be.
In conclusion
The reports we provide can sometimes be an afterthought. But remember there is an opportunity to use these reports in a way to improve your future campaigns and learn some lessons. So the next time you glance at the reports remember there are more than just the open rates to review, by understanding the different reports and learning to interpret them you might just be able to improve your future campaigns and generate a better ROI or gain more leads and enquiries.